![]() Pulitzer Prize winning author Silverman draws upon previously unpublished letters, diaries and scrapbooks in this biography. Houdini!: the Career of Ehrich Weis: American Self-Liberator, Europe's Eclipsing Sensation, World's Handcuff King and Prison Breaker by Kenneth Silverman Reporter Edna Ferber asks her friend Harry Houdini to investigate after a girl mysteriously disappears from her school.Īfter a number of suspicious incidents, Bess Houdini hires private investigator Molly Murphy to protect her husband. After the tenth unsuccessful attempt to contact her late husband, she announced that "10 years is long enough to wait for any man" and declared the experiment a failure. ![]() Bess Houdini dutifully held a séance on the anniversary of his death for the next decade. Houdini died of peritonitis from a ruptured appendix on October 31, 1926. Although he believed that supernatural powers were fraudulent, he and Bess agreed that whichever of them died first would try to contact the survivor. During the 1920s, he began an enthusiastic career debunking spiritualists and mind readers after unsuccessfully trying to communicate with his deceased mother. In addition to performing around the world, Houdini also appeared in movies and became an aviator. During this time, Houdini began to experiment with escape acts and by 1900 he had acquired an international reputation for his escapes from shackles, handcuffs and various locked containers. The couple would marry in 1894 and she became his stage assistant. While performing at Coney Island, Harry met and fell in love with another performer, Wilhelmina Beatrice Rahner, known as Bess. In 1891, he switched his specialty to magic and adopted the stage name Harry Houdini, as an homage to French magician Jean Eugène Robert-Houdin. When he was 9, Ehrich helped to support his family by working as a trapeze artist in vaudville shows. His family emigrated to the United States in 1874 where the spelling of his name was changed to Ehrich Weiss. Bess Houdini lives in these mesmerizing poems!" -Laurence Carr, publisher, Lightwoodpress.Erik Weisz, who would later use the stage name Harry Houdini, was born in Budapest on March 24, 1874. Not only a vibrant poetry collection, this work becomes a feminist document of a woman whose voice must be heard. ![]() This insightful and moving collection reincarnates the spirit of Bess Houdini, bringing forth her emotional life through narrative and fictional auto-biographical poems, placing her husband, “The Great” Harry Houdini in the background. "Jan Zlotnik Schmidt has brought her own conjuring trick to readers. After Houdini’s unexpected death from a burst appendix and peritonitis on Halloween, 1926, for ten years, Bess held seances, hoping to make contact with the spirit of her dead husband. The more famous Houdini became, the more Bess faded into the background. By 1899, Harry concentrated on his escape acts, and throughout the rest of his career, became famous for breaking out of jails, cells, trunks, and straitjackets among other feats of daring and conjuring. After a short courtship of several weeks, they married on Jand began performing magic acts, seances, mentalist acts, and their most famous trick-the Metamorphosis-at circuses, dime museums, and vaudeville halls across the country. ![]() Bess met Harry Houdini when she was performing as part of a song and dance act, entitled The Floral Sisters, in Coney Island. ![]() Wilhelmina Beatrice Rahner, or Bess Houdini, was born on Januin Brooklyn, New York. ![]()
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